DTTLab – LisaZWise.com

Alan Baddeley’s Working Memories

I was planning on reading Alan Baddeley’s classic text on Working Memory, and in searching the library, I found a 2019 version, which I failed to notice is titled “Working Memories”(plural), a really clever title for an autobiography of his career in memory research! It’s been a pleasure to read this book, which covers a lot of theory, but set in both the scientific and social context of the times. It is very instructive for younger academics to understand the very different social and political environment that shapes academia in terms of its funding and the control of gateways into recognition (through academic appointments, the concept of tenure, and the role of publishing in recognised journals). It is also instructive to read of how people navigate through changing times, to hear about the social networks that are so important in understanding the evolution of ideas, and to read about how theory and application are linked. It is somewhat reassuring to know that links between theory and application take a long time to develop, involve a range of different types of researchers, and often involve quite idiosyncratic personalities and interests.

Here is a review of the book which includes this quote:

There is a story about an introduction to a company report in which the document was compared to a bikini: “what is revealed was important, but what it covered was critical” … Written at the age of 84, this book is at the same time an insightful history of cognitive psychology, and an authoritative scientific autobiography.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13546805.2019.1606707?journalCode=pcnp20

The review goes on in more detail in a similar vein to my own views on the book, which I highly recommend as a starting point for anyone wanting to read about cognitive psychology.

Observations on online teaching and coaching

In the new Covid19 world, I enjoy listening to podcasts as I go for my daily walk, and my favourite podcast while I’m walking is Dan John’s podcast. If you haven’t read Dan John’s extensive library of work in the strength and conditioning and coaching world, there are 35 of these podcasts already, and they only started recently!

In today’s podcast, Dan was fielding a question from someone who asked about online coaching being “the way of the future” post-covid19, and I was interested to reflect on Dan’s response. He noted that he had been doing online / remote coaching for a very long time, originally via the post (yep, writing regular letters to his coach about his workouts and training, and getting responses on how he was going and what to do next), and then via the Web (in what now might be called a Blog, but in the olden days was just a regular website).

The key feature of remote or online training is the fact that it is asynchronous. Dan reminded us that, even when it is synchronous, or live, it is asynchronous in the sense that we don’t know when or where our participants might be. When I tune into someone’s live-streamed lunch-time exercise class from Melbourne, it may be midday for me, but it might be 3:00 am for another person in Paris … and the whole way of thinking about 3:00 am training is different! It may also be summer in Melbourne and winter in Paris or vice-versa.

So while many people are happy to put on a Jane Fonda style aerobics video and “follow along”, or tune into a TV or web-cast yoga class, if you are seriously into teaching or coaching your individual students and you need an income stream from so doing, there is a whole lot more going on. Importantly, I am very happy to pay a subscription for Dan John’s workouts and member resources because I already know who he is and a bit about how he thinks, which makes me confident I will get value for money. Do you have enough free content yourself to make someone happy to pay for your ongoing services, and do you have the time, energy and skills to keep on creating fee-worthy materials?

In the podcast, Dan also talked about his experience putting college level courses online, emphasising the huge amount of work required to prepare the materials. This is the very steep learning curve many academics and teachers are on right now – the idea, as Dan expressed it, is that there is a whole lot of work required to create an online learning site, but the payoff is that it is then a bit of a doddle to teach … you just need to pop in regularly to see how people are going and to answer their individual questions. This is when I started gesticulating and trying to talk back to the podcast (so yes, asynchronous, but still synchronous in how my own mind connects with what is being said). The part that Dan may well take foregranted is that the ability to “pop in and see how students are going” is a high level skill in itself. The thing about asynchronous learning is that people have a lot of time to think about your materials – they can ask you things and raise questions that you had not anticipated, and may not be prepared for, and they can do it at times when you are not “in that headspace”. Many teachers get by with knowing enough to fill the scheduled teaching time, and answer a few extra questions, and then “sorry folks, time’s up”. Dan can “pop in and field questions” because of his own formidable depth of knowledge in strength and conditioning, and in religious studies, along with his own dedication to learning from his students. Some of us find interaction with our students to be challenging in a very enjoyable way and it’s what motivates us, but for others, it is very anxiety-provoking. The podcast and forum on Dan’s site emphasise his commitment to “closing the loop with feedback”, whereby he reflects on and responds to people’s feedback. This ensures that he is tailoring his knowledge to each individual, while sharing that learning with his broader community of practice. This is not something that many newbie online coaches will have the skills, experience and enthusiasm to pull off, and they will also not be aware of how much time it takes to do this.

Online coaching has been a “thing” for quite a few years now, and I have pretty much learned all I know about strength and conditioning online, originally through reading the work of people like Krista Scott-Dixon, Brett Contreras, Mark Rippetoe, Jim Wendler and Ross Emanit among others, but eventually settling on Dan John as my “go-to” source of information, particularly after discovering that two young Australian people I know through taekwondo, had randomly stayed at Dan’s house and trained with him (and I say randomly, because it was not a visit planned in advance, but rather Dan’s amazing generosity and hospitality to total strangers because they were interested in his work and were passing through the US with a flexible itinerary).

All of the online people I have learnt from have been building impressive online sites for training for the last decade or more, and most of them have also been building subscription services for some of their material more recently. In the time of Covid19, they already had the platform, the existing content, the strong client base, and serious skills to take it all online. People completely underestimate the amount of deep knowledge, time and other skills required to maintain a steady stream of online content, and to generate new material that matches the changing needs of a changing audience. I have worked in online education for the better part of 25 years, and for the past 5 years or more, I have a flurry of blog posts around Christmas/New Year about how I’m going to update my online presence and reorganise my resources, and then my “real work” of university classes begin, and it all falls in a heap – it really takes dedication to generate regular high quality online content and helps to be part of a team.

So after listening to Dan, I thought I would put together some thoughts on what people might consider if they are thinking of taking their face-to-face training business online. This is a non-exhaustive (but somewhat exhausting) list:

Do you have a loyal face-to-face clientele who want to continue training through Covid19?
- If they are in the same time-zone, can you have them log in to their regular time-slot of class, which you live-stream?
- While the training itself may be sub-par compared with live classes, you will be maintaining the social cohesion of your classes and allowing clients to maintain a routine, which is really important in times of upheaval (for you as well as your clients).
Are you planning on your Covid19 strategy being part of your “new normal”?
- You will have a LOT of work to do in building the range of skills to make it sustainable – I think of this as being in Dan John’s quadrant 3 of training – lots of skills at a high level.
- You will also need to know what your value proposition is in this new normal – with full awareness that your competition will not just be the guy down the street or in the next suburb, but will be a whole global audience.
- At the end of Covid19, people who were ready to go online before the crisis began may have a whole new clientele some of which may originally have been your clients, but there will also be people craving for face-to-face instruction … so you need to be clear about where your primary skills lie and what that will mean into the future.
Do you want to be able to give your clients feedback?
- You can use Facetime, Skype, Zoom, Messenger as easy ways of connecting with your students and running the classes in a way that is familiar TO THEM.
- If you are live-streaming via You-Tube or Vimeo, will this be possible? Let’s Plays have the advantage that the activity being videoed is on the screen, so it is easy to interact with your live class, but it is harder to chat while you’re teaching or participating in a physical class where you may not be able to see the screen or stay in your video shot without someone actually being at the other end of a camera.
- You can have them send videos of their session for you to critique. This is a great way to do things, but VERY time consuming, and not at all sustainable if you have a large client base or a lot of time, or excellent Shark Habits. Apps like Coaches Eye work well for this.
Do you want to be able to pace your session according to how clients are going?
- If they’re your regular clients, they may be comfortable interacting, but you’ll need to be mindful of whether they have space, and whether there are other people also doing your sessions with them.
- Pacing a session to a live audience is a skill, but it is a different skill doing it online where you can’t quickly see people, you can’t quickly see or hear their breathing, when the video is not good enough to notice subtle changes in coordination that might tell you to slow down or switch things up or offer technical corrections.
Do you want them to be able to socialise with their regular training partners?
- You’ll need something where everyone is able to see each other, but your classes will need to be smaller (which is good, but will take more work)
- Forums are a great place to build a community on line, but not everyone is comfortable with “socialising” in this way.
Are you proficient with technology?
- For the most part, to be successful with online coaching, especially if you don’t have a bespoke team of tech support people, requires that you use technology you’re comfortable with.
- For many people (both coaches and clients), that will be their smart phone and services like Instagram and Messenger or Skype. You can also pay for hosted services that allow for live streaming of content, or you can use a host of available Apps, but it is important that you can use those tools well and you know how they work and what data they are capturing (e.g., your members to whom they can target their advertising …).
- Dan makes a great point that I think many people miss: he makes lots of, as he says, “crappy videos” that are “right-now” videos of people actually doing stuff and they are for instructional purposes. They are NOT beautifully curated videos of Insta-perfection and there is a whole other post to write on the difference between right-now online teaching materials for your own specific audience at a particular time versus professionally made digital resources for “everyone”. The short story is that you need a lot of deep knowledge to know what are the important instructional qualities that will help your clients, whereas Insta-perfection is more about advertising your look
Are you able to spend money on pay-for online services?
- If you are just looking to see your business through Covid19, can you really afford to be investing in pay-for online services?
- However if you are trying to create a future business model, can you afford not to. In my experience, you will need to pay for the infrastructure, and you will need to have professional technical support to take care of website issues, live streaming issues if that’s what you are offering for a fee, payment gateways and security if it is your long term business. Would you really set up a physical gym as your main business, and leave all the doors unlocked including the door to your office and to any resources you sell, and never do any maintenance on your equipment? It’s a serious undertaking to create and maintain a website with content that people pay for.

As I noted, these are just a few ideas that came to mind after listening to Dan’s podcast, and the reason why my own website is only updated in bursts and spurts, is that I vacillate between publishing what I’m thinking right now (as blogging used to be) versus trying to write the perfect go-to article. I’m trying to be more like Dan, to put my stuff out there quickly in case it’s useful to others, even though the primary value has been to clarify and record my own ideas and reflections. And I’m trying not to clog up Dan’s forums with overly long posts 🙂

Leadership versus management

As I was sitting in a meeting this afternoon (actually, I was sitting in my garden in the Autumn sun in a virtual meeting), I had an epiphany about the realities of leadership versus management in the time of Covid-19. Leaders lead the way, and managers then implement whatever needs to be implemented to support that way. Good leaders still lead the way even through previously uncharted territory, and they communicate calmly, confidently, truthfully AND regularly – so even if they don’t quite know where they are going, even if they can’t quite see how they’ll get there, they communicate their main message: that they will look after their people to the best of their ability. Good managers then scramble to make it happen.

If your leaders turn out to be managers rather than leaders in a time of crisis, they will say nothing until they have formulated a clear plan and an approved set of processes and sign-offs, despite the fact that such a level of clarity is not feasible when everything around them is changing every day. The end result is that, despite the best of intentions to support their people, they communicate nothing of substance, and their people can feel abandoned.

And for light relief in terms of leadership, I can’t go past this M*A*S*H Covid advice video

Or, in an absence of leadership, some useful advice to get you through from one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, Douglas Adams.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2bcFfMt6rGLTPpbG0yLwPw0/42-douglas-adams-quotes-to-live-by

The new online world of Covid-19

Wow – this was to be my year of getting back into using online tools so that I would be ready for a post-retirement world where I would have time to write a bit more, do a bit more tech stuff etc … but little did I know that my timeline would be fast-tracked to cope with a whole new online world for the foreseeable future (in itself an interesting concept!).

I have moved my lab website to this new domain, and I am trying to set up my own Wiki and Moodle as places for us to share things as if we were all still working in normal times. I will eventually look to putting things like R and Python notebooks in place to share, but I guess that’s on hold for the moment.

I will post my own personal reflections to my own blog, and share the appropriate feed to the DTT lab blog. If that works and you are reading this post from DTT Lab, you can also add your feed to the blog – in fact, I can probably make a page where we can add your own social media feeds so you don’t need to write to multiple places.

New Technologies

It’s that time of year again – time to organise my technology world and work out what tools I’ll be using to make stuff happen at work and at play. I spent a month in Africa at the end of 2013, and for a variety of reasons, that time away involved very little use of technology and almost no use of voice/text. Given that my average number of texts per month has been around 500 for at least the past 5 years, this was quite a change, but not one that was at all difficult. I sort of liked not being at the beck and call of anyone.

I also have a few computers that have reached their complete end of life. I have a 12″ Powerbook G4 Which I purchased around 2003 when I first became a “web developer” – it was my badge of street cred 🙂 I also have a 15″ Powerbook G4 with an Intel chip purchased in 2006 when I became a bona-fide Consultant. Both computers have lasted well beyond their life expectancy – one is being used for dev work by a colleague, and the other finally met its death during the recent heatwave, when Tim left it in the car for 5 over 40 deg days.

During my travels (Sudan, Tanzania, Canberra), my work laptop, a 13″ Macbook Pro housed in a hard-shelled case, suffered screen-cracking in my checked luggage, despite having been transported in a similar fashion many many other times. I use an external monitor for my Macbook Pro at work anyway, so the laptop is still very usable, and I am also trying to return to being a regular bike commuter rather than a fair-weather occasional bike rider, so I also want to reduce the weight I carry every day by not hauling a laptop with me everywhere.

To this end, I’ve been playing with a Sony Experia Android phone (big but with a 22 MP camera) as a possible alternative to an iPhone/iPad/laptop combo, and I’ve been thinking about switching from an iPad to an iPad mini and then using a non-smart phone just as a phone. What I’ve realised is that I really want a lighter but fully functional laptop and that the smartphone/iPad solution is not workable for what I do (data analysis, writing, editing, graphics). So the real answer was a Macbook Air.

The days of burning DVDs seem to be a thing of the past now that we have cheap multi-gigabyte thumb drives and multi-terabyte external drives, so the limited hard-drive capacity of the Macbook Air is no longer a consideration. I did a quick pricing of a tricked up version via educational pricing, and was a bit despondent that it came out at over 2K – money I can’t really justify if I want to travel as well.

Anyhow, to cut a long story shorter, many planets aligned when I went to ride my bike to work and discovered a popped spoke – I went to my favourite bike store in Mount Waverley so that Dicky could fix my wheel, and this brought me within spitting distance of my favourite Apple reseller. I went to look for my Macbook Air, and discovered that smaller Apple resellers find it hard to get into the Apple Educational pricing (not best pleased with that, since I want to support local businesses and they’ve been great in the past when they were in Burwood. However, I also discovered the ex-demo market and for less than my brand new Macbook Air educational pricing, I now have an ex-demo fully tricked up Macbook Air plus an ex-demo iPhone 5, both of which are mine. Very happy. (For the moment. Until I find out things like iPhone 5 and Macbook Air can’t use Airdrop between them, nor can they pair up to send files via Bluetooth. Say what????? I have to go via email or DropBox???? I could send files from my old Nokia to my old Mac so what’s going on here – it doesn’t stop piracy in any way, shape or form, but it makes it a pain in the arse to take a photo on my iPhone and insert it into my blog post!). I was able to support a local business, and in the two days that I’ve had my new toys, I’ve referred more than 10 people there too!

So, in the next few months, I am planning to ramp up my technical proficiency in a number of areas:

Using R for file manipulation
Performing analyses in R
Using R and Gephi for Social Network Analysis
Blogging effectively and regularly, trialling MarsEdit
Getting proficient with WordPress
Getting proficient with Excel (because most people who should be using databases, graphing software, mathematical software or R/SPSS are probably doing things in Excel instead
Having a good backup and data storage capability

So my new tools of choice are going to be my Macbook Air for anywhere, anytime work/play and my software tools of choice may well turn out to be:

MarsEdit – blogging tool that allows posts to be written offline and published to a blog at a later date
R – open source stats tool with advanced scripting capabilities
Gephi – network data visualisation software with some built-in quantitative analyses
WordPress – blogging software

I will also be exploring the different options for file sharing, as befits someone whose expertise is supposedly in Digital Technologies and Training, and as we head into the possibly-post-Facebook world 🙂

DropBox, iCloud, Swinburne’s netstorage
Flickr, Picasa
Vimeo, YouTube
SlideShare

Science as a “job” versus a hobby (with an aside on negentropy)

I’ve been reading Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi’s work on creativity and flow (I can do this now that Wikipedia has helpfully allowed me to pronounce his name so I can actually talk about his work! (“cheek-sent-me-high-ee” [note by me: presumably this is the American pronunciation, which is probably the best I can aspire to but nothing like the orginal]. Originally Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈmihaːj ˈtʃiːksɛntmihaːji]).

He has many interesting things to say, and his concepts of positive psychology / optimum experience resonate strongly with how I view the world. As with Vygotsky’s work, the way his ideas are represented in educational and psychology literature (actually, more likely I’ve read text books or review articles) does not do them justice. In particular, his description of attentional processes and their relationship with flow deserves much closer examination on my part as it is at the heart of expert skilled performance. But probably most pertinent to my current area of study are his comments on formal study (extrinsically driven “inquiry”) versus informal study (intrinsically motivated “hobby”) and their influence in organising “psychic energy” (flow). (And as an aside re psychic energy: I love the idea of negentropy or “the specific entropy deficit of the ordered sub-system relative to its surrounding chaos” which can be used “as a measure of distance to normality” – in fact, it is probably an extremely important concept to get my head around. I suspect that Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of psychic energy, far from being New Age mumbo-jumbo, provides an opportunity to understand the “Chi energy” of martial arts in terms of cognitive science … this aside should probably be a new post …)

So back to the comment on formal study (“real scientists”) versus informal study (“amateur scientists”) from Csikzsentmihalyi, M. (1009) “Flow: The psychology of optimal experience”, New York: HarperPerennial, p137-138). It is pertinent to my current way of thinking particularly as a comment on the push for output / performance metrics to determine whether or not academics are “active researchers” and quality assurance of academia by ensuring all academics have Ph.D.s. to prove their research credentials …

Is it really true that a person without a Ph.D., who is not working a one of the major research centers, no longer has any chance of contributing to the advancement of science? Or is this just one of those largely unconscious efforts at mystification to which all successful institutions inevitably succumb? It is difficult to answer these questions, partly because what constitutes “science” is of course defined by those very institutions that are in line to benefit from their monopoly.
There is no doubt that a layman cannot contribute, as a hobby to the kind of research that depends on multibillion-dollar supercolliders, or on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. But then, such fields to not represent the only science there is. The mental framework that makes science enjoyable is accessible to every one. It involves curiosity, careful observation, a disciplined way of recording events, and finding ways to tease out the underlying regularities in what one learns. It also requires the humility to be willing to learn from the results of past investigators, coupled with enough skepticism and openness of mind to reject beliefs that are not supported by facts.
Defined in this broad sense, there are more practicing amateur scientists that one would think. Some focus their interest on health, and try to find out everything they can about a disease that threatens them or their families. Following in Mendel’s footsteps, some learn whatever they can about breeding domestic animals, or creating new hypbrid flowers. Others diligently replicate the observations of early astrononmers with their back yard telescopes. There are closet geolgistists who roam the wilderness in search of minerals, cactus collectores who scour the desert mesas for new specimens, and probably hunderds of thousands of individuals who have pushed their mechanical skills to the point that they are vergin g on true scientific understanding.
What keeps many of these people from developing their skills further is the belief that they will never be able to become genuine “professional” scientists. and therefore that their hobby should not be taken seriously. But there is no better reason for doing science than that sense of order it brings to the mind of the seeker. If flow, rather than success and recognition, is the measure by which to judge its value, science can contribute immensely to the quality of life.

Csikszentmihalyi has many more quotable quotes and pertinent comments, and it is an interesting study in motivation to note that I only blog things when the book I’m reading and the computer (rather than note pad) are in close proximity (I also have hundreds of photos taken at each single event that I photograph, but very few occasions where I take out the camera …)

While specialisation is necessary to develop the complexity of any pattern of thought, the goals-ends relationship must always be kept clear: specialisation is for the sake of thinking better, and not an end in itself. Unfortunately many serious thinkers devote all their mental effort to becoming well-known scholars, but in the meantime they forget their initial purpose in scholarship.
There are two words whose meanings reflect our somewhat warped attitudes toward levels of commitment to physical or mental activities. These are the terms amateur and dilettante. Nowadays these labels are slightly derogatory. An amateur or dilettante is someone not quite up to par, a person not to be taken very seriously, one whose performance falls short of professional standards. But originally amateur from the latin verb amare, “to love,” referred to a person who loved what he was doing. Similarly, a dilettante , from the latin delectare, “to find delight in,” was someone who enjoyed a given activity. The earliest meanings of these words therefore drew attention to experiences rather than accomplishments; they described the subjective rewards individuals gained from doing things, instead of focusing on how well they were achieving. Nothing illustrates as clearly our changing attitudes towards the value of experience as the fate of these two words. There was a time when it was admirable to be an amateur poet or a dilettante scientist, because it meant that the quality of life could be improved by engaging in such activities. But increasingly the emphasis has been to value behaviour over subjective states; what is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance rather than the quality of experience. Consequently it has become embarrassing to be called a dilettante, even though to be a dilettante is to achieve what counts most – the enjoyment one’s actions provide.

An addendum … and possibly why I don’t blog often. It’s the unfinished nature of blogging that concerns me – by the time I’ve “finished”, what there is to write is a full-blown paper, not a quick comment. But when I do actually blog something while I’m still developing an idea, the logical continuation of the thought keeps popping up after I’ve published the post and I add addendums like this:

The bad connotations that the terms amateur and dilettante have earned for themselves over the years are due largely to the blurring of the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goals. An amateur who pretends to know as much as a professional is probably wrong, and up to some mischief. The point of becoming an amateur scientist is not to compete with professionals on their own turf, but to use a symbolic discipline to extend mental skills, and to create order in consciousness. On that level, amateur scholarship can hold its own, and can be even more effective that its professional counterpart. But the moment that amateurs lose sight of this goal, and use knowledge mainly to bolster their egos or to achieve a material advantage, then they become caricatures of the scholar. Without training in the discipline of skepticism and reciprocal criticism that underlies the scientific method, laypersons who venture into the fields of knowledge with prejudiced goals can become more ruthless, more egregiously unconcerned with truth, than even the most corrupt scholar.